smoking cutting head

[woodhog]

hi is there a reason that when i cut records sometimes the recording head starts to smoke? too loud? art the tunes too hot?

[cuttercollector]

Uh, yeah! Too loud.
You are in danger of melting the coil, shorting turns of wire, burning it out etc. Didn't you smell something first? Did you hear a lot of distortion on what you cut?
What type of head is it? Perhaps you can get louder cuts by having it re-magnetized. Less energy in for any given cutting volume.
When I was playing with my Rek-O-Kut head with an external amp and eq before having it rebuilt, once I pushed it pretty hard and began to smell that distinctive warm magnet wire smell. But at that point the cuts although not that loud, were very distorted on peaks like a small radio distorting when you turn it up too loud. Another possibility is you are cutting with a very small amp withnot much power and it is clipping. A clipping amp puts out flat top waveforms which cause heat in the cutter. But again, you should hear distortion before you see smoke I would think.
One more thought. It has been stated on this forum that if you can set up your cutter so it cuts properly with a longer shank stylus, you can get more groove excursion (loudness) in some cases.
Don't blow up your head!

[cuttercollector]

I note from another post that this is an Audax head. Most heads with the exception of things like Grampian, Westrex etc. are not designed to cut at the levels we expect today's records to be at. That point has not been stressed enough on this forum. Almost all the others were designed when 20-30 watts was a big amp. They were also designed primarily for cutting non-microgroove 78s. So you can't just hook up a modern 200W solid state amp, jam the eq to close to RIAA specs put in a microgroove stylus and expect to cut hot dance tracks. Even the older pro heads have a hard time with that without suplimental cooling etc.

[Jccc]

You should send it to Gib at West tech and he will fix your cuttinghead to cut louder and remagnitized it and fix the coil.
i had the same happen to me also. I also have a Audex cuttinghead. I found out everytime i sent a loud signal into the head i would smell a wierd smell and then see smoke coming out.

[Doug6N]

Hi everyone:

Sigh! Why are so many people watt happy? This old equipment can do a pretty good job. But not to todays standards or maybe I should say wants?

I second cutter collector and Jccc. Rebuild head and easy on the watts.

Doug

[JayDC]

Thats funny, I seem to get very loud levels +14db/0.. I use a presto 1-c, and no smoke, no smell, no problems whats so ever. I do not put a lot of power to the head, I just adjust the RIAA curve to my own custom curve that give the impression on play back that the cut is louder then it is..

[Jim L.]

Same thing happened to me when I pushed the power to far on my RCA MI-4889. Burned up the voice coil. I just goofed. I made a simple coil winding form out of a couple of washers, a bolt and nuts. Measured the length of the old wire and wound new wire on the form. Things are back to normal now. These old cutter heads don't need much amplifier power to get them moving. Use care.

Regards,
Jim L.
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Experten der Röhre Funktechnik.